Review of The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills by Joanna Pearson

For anyone who's ever survived a rite of passage or performed a mating dance at Prom...The
Japanese hold a Mogi ceremony for young women coming of age. Latina
teenagers get quinceaneras. And Janice Wills of Melva, NC ... has to
compete in the Miss Livermush pageant.Janice loves
anthropology--the study of human cultures--and her observations help her
identify useful rules in the chaotic world of high school. For
instance: Dancing is an effective mating ritual--but only if you're good
at it; Hot Theatre Guys will never speak to Unremarkable Smart Girls
like Janice and her best friend, Margo; and a Beautiful Rich Girl will
always win Melva's annual Miss Livermush pageant.

But when a Hot
Theatre Guy named Jimmy Denton takes an interest in Janice, all her
scientific certainties explode. For the first time, she has to be part
of the culture that she's always observed; and all the charts in the
world can't prove how tough--and how sweet--real participation and a
real romance can be.

Funny, biting, and full of wisdom, this marks the debut of a writer to watch.

The idea of this book really appealed to me, I didn’t know much about
Anthropology but I love High School stories like this one and figured it
would be a great thing to read. Unfortunately, I didn’t really enjoy
this one. I didn’t love it and I wouldn’t go as far as to say I loved
it, it was just ‘meh’. Not really memorable enough. Even as I type I’m
forgetting lot of stuff about it.

The idea of the story is pretty basic: Anthropology student wants to
create an awesome paper for some Anthro thing, so she can try and get a
scholarship in some college because the one near to her just isn’t good
enough. She works out that the best way to do this is to enter her
town’s pageant competition so she can see it from the pageant
contestant’s point of view, that way she can study them better and make
her paper super super awesome. Along the way she realises that her
friends are better than she realised and she need to appreciate them
more and everything ends up with shiny happy rainbows.

Except Janice is really, really mean. And pretty shallow too. She cares
more about her stupid Anthro paper than her friends and for some reason
got it into her head that she’s amazing at Antro and bla bla bla. Now,
the real problem is that when she realised how mean she was being and
changed, I didn’t particularly like her character then either. I guess
we just weren’t destined to be friends.

The Miss Livermush pageant. Oh lord. The cheesiness of this name never
failed to irritate me. The entire book is centred around this pageant
and yet when they finally started the pageant there wasn’t really much
there. It was over pretty quickly.

The book itself is written like this: Anthropology Observation
#33333388822: Yada yada yada (instead of chapters, which I really liked,
it was cute). Then while I was trying to read the story, a few random
facts would be thrown at me, mostly ones that I could leave out of the
story and not notice the disappearance. I think they were just thrown in
to bulk up the story.

3/5

Received free from a blogger who has closed their site, in exchange for an honest review. So naturally I nicked my review back off her because she was rude to me.